Thanks for the reply! I haven’t played D3 since September ’12 and haven’t read patch notes in a couple months so I’m not up-to-date on what’s going on in the game today. I’ve been playing Borderlands 2–a more productive loot-fest–and wringing my hands over the upcoming Starbound, which I plan to dedicate the rest of my natural life to.

The economy in D3 ultimately tanked because individual players were not able to find anything awesome, partly because drop rates were too low, randomness was too random, and the auction-house was an instant feedback tool that helped you figure out the item you just found–one that you thought was pretty damn good–is unsalable garbage and a better item could be purchased for a handful of gold.

Finding a Vex rune in D2, at least prior to Blizzard drastically increasing drop rates, had nothing to do with hard work. It was either pure legit RNG–akin to winning the Little Lotto–or “trading” for something you knew had a questionable past. Did your friend trade his legit Vex rune at its horribly devalued rate? I highly doubt it. A completely legit player would encase it in glass and put it on a shelf as a reminder that anything is possible. Either that or he could “trade” something else for a ZOD and make a BOTD.

What D3 has shown us is that when cheating is more difficult, or impossible, we begin to see the truer value of rare items. How many thousands of dollars do you think a D2 ZOD rune would have sold for at its original drop-rate if it was impossible to cheat? The ZOD rune was like getting a nearly perfect roll on a bow in D3. Near-perfect-rolled bows in D3 sold for thousands of real dollars back in August. They sold for thousands because Blizzard made them obscenely rare, assigned a real-world dollar value to rarity, neglected to design any sort of item or gold-sink, and then proceeded to monetize billions of “virtual” micro-transactions. Why bind a $2000 bow to an account when it can trade hands–and Blizzard can take their 10% cut–ten times over?

D2 is a video-game. I play video-games because I love them, I have an escapist personality, and I don’t have a yacht with a deck made of pure cocaine and a hold full of ponies, Porsches, and prostitutes in real-life. The players in D2 that had BOTD weapons were either purely legit and lucky enough to win the Power-Ball at the exact moment they are being struck by lightning and attacked by a shark (and wouldn’t sell or trade a ZOD rune in a million years), pure cheaters who knew how to dupe and hack and all that stuff (and who would give away a handful of ZOD runes for an Enchanted Castle skee-ball token), or were hybrids like me–people that didn’t know how to cheat but would gladly pay a couple bucks for the privilege of playing with the same kick-ass item that everyone and their dog was already swinging around.

I used to play Ultima Online. In UO there was land and housing. I wanted a small cabin so I worked my tail off day and night until I had saved enough money to buy a house deed. I took my survey tool and trotted off through the countryside looking for a nice scenic spot to call my own. What I found was that every single speck of land capable of supporting a house already had a house (or mansion, or castle) on it and if I wanted to “work” for an existing house at their current values I would be playing twelve hours a day for months. So I cheated. I went to Ebay and spent $70 on a crappy little shack in the middle of nowhere.

It’s not surprising to me that when game developers mirror real life we find people cheating, abusing the systems, knowingly trading with people who do so, or purchasing items for real-life cash. It’s how the games are designed. D2 needed people duping ZOD runes because there are only so many runs a truly legit player in search of the best items in the game will do before realizing it’s never going to happen. It’s great that your friend found a real VEX rune. Now he just needs to find 127 more–not including gems–if he wants to craft his own ZOD.

It’s the developers that make or break their games, not the players. I knew D3 was broken when I had played 400+ hours, was not wearing a single piece of gear I had looted myself, and found myself loading my legit Blizz-Bucks account with $40 of my legit real-world booty so I could buy a legitimately above-average bow in the hopes it would be just enough for me to break through the developer-created impassable barrier of A2 Inferno so I could traipse about the loot-filled paradise of A3 Inferno, making millions–er…billions–of legit gold, and then cash out my legit $40 in no time. That was the plan at least…

“I don’t care to have my video games remind me that Real Life winners have lots of money and hard work often amounts to nothing.”

Are you kidding me? This is exactly what people like you make the game to be. A friend told me he had legitimately found a Vex or some other High rune, and he wanted to trade it, but he found out it was almost worth nothing, so he didn’t get what he deserved. So this is EXACTLY what diablo 2 nowadays reminds us legit players of…